The Merchant of Death (9 page)

“W-well, yeah.”

“Oh yeah, that's perfect,” shouted Courtney. “Then Bobby jumps out and yells, ‘Surprise!' and I have to move to another state because no one will ever let me forget that I was dumb enough to fall for the most ridiculous practical joke in the history of practical jokes. I don't think so!”

With that, she snatched up her pack and started to walk away.

“Courtney, stop!” shouted Mark.

Courtney wheeled back to Mark, throwing him a look of total disdain. When you get a look like that from Courtney Chetwynde, it's really hard not to quickly dig a hole and bury yourself in it. It took every bit of strength for Mark to go on. When he spoke, it was sincere and without a trace of a stutter.

“It's hard for me to believe it too,” he began. “But this isn't a
joke. I don't know if everything in those pages is true, but I've seen some things that I can't explain. I swear I have. And it's enough to make me believe something totally bizarre happened to Bobby.”

Courtney didn't move. Was she starting to believe him? Or was she just waiting for him to finish so she could tell him, again, what an idiot she thought he was?

Mark took the chance and continued, “I know it's a lot to swallow. But if this is all just some big old practical joke, then where's Bobby's house?”

Courtney looked past Mark to the empty lot. Mark wondered what she was thinking. Was she remembering how she had come to this spot last night, gone inside a house that was no longer here and kissed Bobby Pendragon?

“I'm scared, Courtney,” added Mark. “I want to know what happened, but I don't think I can figure it out by myself.”

Courtney stared at Mark for a moment more, as if trying to read his mind. She then walked past him to stand in the center of the empty lot. She did a slow 360 around to take everything in. But there was nothing to take in. There wasn't a shred of evidence to show that a family of four, with a dog, had lived there not twelve hours before. Courtney was the kind of person who was always on top of things. It didn't matter if it was a game of volleyball, or an argument with her parents, Courtney always knew how to handle difficult situations and turn them to her advantage. But this was different. She couldn't control this situation because she didn't know the rules. Yet.

“All right,” she said thoughtfully. “We can't go crazy trying to figure out everything at once. It's just too . . . too much.” She was half talking to Mark and half thinking out loud. “I don't know anything about quigs or Travelers or plumes—”

“Flumes,” he corrected her.

“Whatever,” she snapped back. “That's all fantasy to me. But this house . . . this house being gone is about as real as it gets. If we can find out what happened to the house, maybe that'll point us toward Bobby.”

Mark smiled for the first time in forever. He had an ally, and it was somebody he knew could make things happen.

“Where do we start?” he asked.

Courtney started to walk toward the street with her long, bold strides. She was now on a mission. “We've got to find his parents. No way they disappeared too.”

“Excellent!” shouted Mark. They were moving forward.

Courtney suddenly stopped, whirled around, and went nose to nose with Mark.

“And I swear, Dimond,” she said while jabbing him in the chest with a strong finger. “If you're pulling my chain about all this, I'll slam you so hard you'll have to reach up to tie your shoes.”

“So noted,” gulped Mark.

Courtney continued on toward the street. Mark followed while stuffing the parchment papers into his pack. As he was about to step onto the sidewalk, he took one last look back at the empty space where his best friend's house used to be. He could understand where Courtney's disbelief was coming from. The story contained in the parchment papers was tough to believe, even though some of it had proven to be true. At least the part about Courtney, that is. That was the easy part. The rest was just plain incredible. And there was a mystery too. Nowhere in the pages did Bobby say anything about his house disappearing. If everything had played out the way the pages said, when he and his uncle Press took off on the motorcycle, the house was still here. Something happened to it after they were gone, which meant Bobby didn't know that his house was history. Oddly enough, this gave Mark some hope. Courtney was right. If they
could figure out what happened to the house, then maybe they could make some sense out of what happened to Bobby.

There was another thought that nagged at the back of Mark's mind, and it was one he didn't feel comfortable sharing with Courtney. At least not yet. It had to do with the ring, and the fact that Bobby sent the pages to him. The question that Mark kept asking himself was: “Why?” If all that Bobby wrote about were true, and he was on a most incredible adventure, then why would he take the time to write down everything that happened and send it to him? Sure, they were best friends, and Bobby wrote that he hoped the pages would someday prove that he wasn't making everything up. But that didn't seem to be enough to justify doing it. Mark felt that somehow there was an important reason that he should know about what was happening to Bobby.

For now, he was happy just to be on the road to making sense of what had happened to his best friend. The logical place to start would be to find Bobby's parents, and ask them what happened to the house. So with that positive thought in mind, Mark turned his back on the empty lot and ran to catch up with Courtney. They were both sure that their questions would soon be answered, they would find Bobby, and life would return to normal in time for school the next day.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

Their investigation first took them to Mark's house. They figured it would be easier to track down Bobby's parents over the phone than by racing around town on their bikes, or by taking the bus. Mark lived on a cul-de-sac about a half a mile from Bobby's house. Rather, half a mile from where Bobby's house used to be. Of course, when he left for school that morning Mark hadn't anticipated that the fabulous Courtney Chetwynde would be paying a visit to his bedroom that afternoon. The odds of that happening were roughly the same as . . . well . . .
his best friend being launched across the universe.

“Wait here,” commanded Mark as he ran into his bedroom and closed the door in Courtney's face. Courtney rolled her eyes, but respected his privacy.

Mark took one look at his room and wanted to faint. He wasn't sure which was the most embarrassing: the dirty underwear and socks that were scattered everywhere; the cartoon superhero posters that he hadn't gotten around to taking down; the
Sports Illustrated
bikini posters that he had just gotten around to putting up; or the rancid smell that seemed to permeate the whole squalid mess. Mark went into overdrive. He threw open a window, scooped up an armload of the offending Fruit Of The Looms and jammed as many as he could fit behind the pillow of his unmade bed.

Then the door opened and Courtney charged in.

“Look, I've got two older brothers. It's not possible to gross me out—” She took a look at the room and stopped dead in her tracks. Mark stood frozen holding a bunch of dirty gray socks that in an earlier life had actually been white. Courtney sniffed the air and had to try hard not to gag. “I was wrong. I am totally grossed out,” she managed to say. “Did something die in here?”

“S-sorry,” he said in complete embarrassment. “It n-needs a little air.”

“It needs fumigation. Open another window before I pass out,” gagged Courtney.

Mark tossed his bunch of socks out of one window and quickly threw open another. Courtney surveyed the room, stopping in front of two posters on the wall. One was a colorful Hentai-animation superhero cartoon, the other was a gorgeous girl lying on a tropical beach in a leopard-print thong.

Courtney said, “Looks like you've got kind of a conflicted puberty versus playschool thing going on.”

Mark stood in front of the posters, blocking them. “Can we f-focus on the important problem, please?” he said curtly.

Courtney got the message. Now wasn't the time to be giving Mark grief. She sat down at his desk as he quickly cleared off the F-117 model plane he had been building in order to give her room to work.

“Phone book,” she said. All business.

Mark went to his closet in search of one. Courtney found a scratch pad of paper and opened a desk drawer to look for a pen. Big mistake.

“Well, I solved one mystery,” she announced.

“What?” asked Mark hopefully.

Courtney reached into his drawer and pulled out a revolting-looking block of yellow ooze.

“I know why your room smells like a shoe,” she said, holding out a rotten piece of moldy cheese as if it were diseased. It probably was. Mark instantly grabbed it.

“Hey, I've been looking for that,” he exclaimed.

Courtney rolled her eyes and grabbed the phone book Mark had found. The plan was to call Bobby's parents at work. Mr. Pendragon was a writer for the local newspaper and Mrs. Pendragon was the assistant librarian in town. Courtney found both numbers and called both places. Unfortunately she got the same disturbing information each time. Neither of Bobby's parents had shown up for work that day and neither had called in to say why. That was bad. She then called Glenville School where Bobby's sister, Shannon, was in the third grade. Again, she got the same answer. Shannon hadn't come to school that day. After hearing this last bit of information, Courtney slowly put the phone back down in the cradle and looked to Mark.

“They're
all
missing,” she said soberly.

Mark quickly grabbed the phone and dialed a number.

“Who are you calling?” asked Courtney.

“I'm dialing Bobby's number.” He did, and what he got was a recorded message from the operator that said: “The number you have reached is not in service.” Mark slammed the phone down.

“That's impossible!” he shouted. “I just called him yesterday! A whole family can't just vanish!”

On a hunch, Courtney took the phone book and flipped through it. She got to the “P” section and searched for “Pendragon.” She checked, double-checked, triple-checked and then announced: “It's not here. Their name isn't here.”

Mark grabbed at the book and looked for himself. Courtney was right; there was no listing for “Pendragon.”

“Is their number unlisted?” asked Courtney.

“No,” answered Mark quickly. This seemed to upset him more than anything else. “And I'll tell you something else. Bobby and I looked up his number in this very book about a year ago. I was goofing around and next to ‘Pendragon' I wrote ‘Sucks.' I know, lame joke, but I did it. And now it's n-not there. It's n-not erased, it's n-not cut out, it's just. . . not there, like it was never there!”

This had gotten out of hand. A whole family was missing. There was only one thing to do. They had to report it to the police. This wasn't the kind of thing they wanted to do over the phone, so the two of them headed right for the Stony Brook Police Station.

Stony Brook was a little town in Connecticut that wasn't exactly a center for criminal activity. There was an occasional robbery, or fight, but most of the time the Stony Brook Police Department kept itself busy by making sure people obeyed the traffic laws and cleaned up after their dogs.

When Courtney and Mark walked into the police station, they weren't exactly sure what they were going to say. They decided that they would stick to the obvious facts, which were
that Bobby and his family were nowhere to be found and that their house was gone. Telling them about the ring and the parchment and the wild story that supposedly came from Bobby would be a bit much to throw at them at first. They spoke to a policeman by the name of Sergeant D'Angelo sitting behind the large front desk. Courtney did the talking. Mark was too nervous. She explained how Bobby hadn't shown up for the game last night and didn't come to school today. She told him how they had gone to the Pendragon's house to find that it wasn't there anymore, and none of the other family members were where they should have been. Sergeant D'Angelo listened to everything they had to say and took notes on a form. Courtney had the strange feeling that the policeman didn't believe a word they were saying, but he had to go through the motions because it was his job. After he finished the form, he walked away from the front desk and went to his computer. He clicked away on the keyboard, read the screen, and occasionally glanced back to Mark and Courtney. Was he scowling? Finally, he stood up and came back to the desk to face them.

“Look kids,” he said with a frown. “I don't know what you're trying to pull here, but you're wasting my time and taxpayers' money.”

Mark and Courtney were stunned.

“What are you talking about?” asked Courtney. “Didn't you listen? A family is missing. Isn't that the kind of thing the Stony Brook Police should be worried about?”

This didn't impress Sergeant D'Angelo. “Pendragon, right?” he said. “Two Linden Place?”

“That's r-right,” answered Mark.

“I just went through the town registry,” said the sergeant with force. “There is no family by that name living in Stony Brook. There is no house on Two Linden Place. There has never been a house on Two Linden Place. So the only possible explanation is
that you're either pulling some kind of joke, or you're talking about a family of ghosts and no, the Stony Brook Police are not interested in tracking down a family of ghosts!”

With that, he tore up the form he was filling out and tossed it in the wastebasket. Courtney was livid. She was all set to leap over that desk, grab the smug cop and force him to go to their school where everybody knew Bobby. She might have done it too, except for one thing.

The ring in Mark's pocket started to twitch.